The South Karelian Institute of Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT) is examining the disruptiveness of the noise generated by wind power plants in Finland. The study combines the measurement of the noise produced ...

Maritime traffic on the world's oceans has increased four-fold over the past 20 years, likely causing more water, air and noise pollution on the open seas, according to a new study quantifying global ship ...

A team of engineers and scientists has identified a source of electronic noise that could affect the functioning of instruments operating at very low temperatures, such as devices used in radio telescopes ...

Brothers Lav Varshney with the University of Illinois, and Kush, with IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center have together come up with a way to create odor canceling smells, akin to white noise for sound. ...

Harman, an audio and infotainment company, has something called HALOsonic in its product line, for noise management, which it co-developed with Lotus Engineering. The company is expanding its noise management ...

The soundtrack to a wild rhinoceros's life is wind passing through the savannah grass, birds chirping, and distant animals moving across the plains. But a rhinoceros in a zoo listens to children screaming, cars passing, and ...

When listening to the Earth, what clues can seismic data reveal about the impact of urban life? Although naturally occurring vibrations have proven extremely useful to seismologists, until now the vibrations ...

Unable to fly, nestling birds depend on their parents for both food and protection: vocal communication between parents and offspring helps young birds to determine when they should beg for food and when they should crouch ...

Who's in your network, checking out your data? The latest invasive digital creature is Sandworm, a piece of malware discovered to be using a previously unknown Windows vulnerability to infiltrate government networks, spying on systems at NATO, t ...

Fujitsu Laboratories today announced that it has produced a transceiver chip for millimeter-wave radar in a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) implementation, which is a semiconductor process ...

Error-correcting codes are one of the glories of the information age: They're what guarantee the flawless transmission of digital information over the airwaves or through copper wire, even in the presence ...

(Phys.org) —A trio of researchers with the University of Miami has recorded sounds made by fish larvae in both the open ocean and in their lab. In their paper published in the journal Biology Letters, Erica ...

Lessons learned through Monash University research into the reduction of wheel squeal noise of trains in Hong Kong has assisted the GoldLinQ consortium to resolve noise problems with the new Gold Coast light ...

Noise

In common use, the word noise means any unwanted sound. In both analog and digital electronics, noise is random unwanted perturbation to a wanted signal; it is called noise as a generalisation of the acoustic noise ("static") heard when listening to a weak radio transmission with significant electrical noise. Signal noise is heard as acoustic noise if the signal is converted into sound (e.g., played through a loudspeaker); it manifests as "snow" on a television or video image. High noise levels can block, distort, change or interfere with the meaning of a message in human, animal and electronic communication.

In signal processing or computing it can be considered random unwanted data without meaning; that is, data that is not being used to transmit a signal, but is simply produced as an unwanted by-product of other activities. "Signal-to-noise ratio" is sometimes used to refer to the ratio of useful to irrelevant information in an exchange.

In biology, noise can describe the variability of a measurement around the mean, for example transcriptional noise describes the variability in gene activity between cells in a population.

In many cases, the special case of thermal noise arises, which sets a fundamental lower limit to what can be measured or signaled and is related to basic physical processes described by thermodynamics, some of which are expressible by simple formulae.

In some fields, noise means unwanted information or data that is not relevant to the hypothesis or theory being investigated or tested.